The present invention relates to a trailer-mounted apparatus with rotating platform for loading and handling, in succession, frames for stacked coops for poultry and the like taken continuously from farming pens and fed into the individual coops of each frame by gravity by means of conventional tubular conveyors or the like, arranged at an angle above the frames to be filled.
Small cages known as coops are conventionally used to transport and handle large quantities of poultry at the same time; these coops have a single openable door, have the shape of a parallelepiped with a rectangular base, and are stacked inside a cage-like retention frame in one or two rows of mutually adjacent stacks so that all the coop doors are on the same outer face of the retention frame.
The poultry, for example chickens, guinea fowl, and other similar farmyard animals, is normally loaded into the individual coops of the retention frame by means of a duct in which suction is formed; said duct sucks the poultry from a confined region of the pen where they are gathered by means of various gathering systems and then carries them into a container which is located at a given height from the ground; from there the poultry is sent, inside a tunnel-like duct or the like which is tilted and arranged adjacent to the opening of each coop, so that the poultry enters the coops by gravity.
Special towable trailers with a rotating platform are used to handle the empty or loaded coop frames; the frames are loaded onto said trailers and unloaded from them by means of fork-lift trucks.
The trailers are normally constituted by a rectangular chassis which is mounted on wheels and on which an equally rectangular horizontal platform is arranged; the platform can rotate on the trailer chassis by means of a support which is shaped like a fifth wheel that has a vertical axis, and the platform is generally moved by an electric motor and by an associated transmission belt.
A secondary frame is furthermore anchored to the two ends of the rotating platform and has a retention sidewall on which the coop frame is retained; by rotating the platform through 180.degree. a frame containing empty coops loaded at one end of the platform can thus be moved into the loading position and another empty coop frame can be placed on the opposite end during loading; when loading of the first coop frame is complete, the loaded coop frame returns to the initial position by means of a further rotation of the platform through 180.degree. and is removed from the initial position by means of a fork-lift truck; at the same time, another empty coop frame assumes the loading position.
In practice it has been observed that the handling of coop frames by using these known trailers with rotating platforms, while allowing correct arrangement and filling of the coops with the various kinds of poultry, nonetheless has some limitations and drawbacks when the coops are of the rectangular type and are necessarily loaded onto the rotating platform and unloaded from it so that their longer side, where the doors are located, is parallel to the longitudinal axis of the platform.
On the other hand, if the coop frames are lifted by inserting the forks from their shortest side, the correct arrangement of the coop frames on the platform, i.e. in which their vertical face which supports all the doors is arranged transversely to the median axis of the platform, is more complicated and entails longer downtimes.
The same drawbacks and limitations also occur during the unloading of the coop frames, with the coops filled with poultry, from the end of the rotating platform.